Like many modern women, Marilyn Minter has a complicated relationship with beauty. Both her personal feelings and her luminous artworks are fraught with contempt and desire for the beauty-industrial complex, and animated by attraction and repulsion for our society’s...
The color green has had many connotations throughout history: Pope Innocent III declared it the official Church color for the “ordinary time” between holy days; Frau Minne, the 12th Century German personification of courtly love, wore a green dress, and the color was...
A wide range of lively openings dotted the city this past weekend, including openings at Launch and KP Projects on La Brea, the closing of a terrific exhibition at Keystone Art Space, and the intensely beautiful "Carbon" at Fellows of Contemporary Art in Chinatown...
Eastern concepts meld with Western painting methods in Thai artist Kamol Tassananchalee's mystical abstractions currently on view at LA Artcore. This transnational painter, who maintains a studio in Chatsworth, received his MFA from Otis in 1977, was titled National...
The larger than life-size, amber toned image of the German artist Joseph Beuys appears to be marching out of the gallery, striding forward towards us. In a hand written note at his feet, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (1972) grandly decrees, “We are the revolution.” The...
"Testament of the Spirit" at Pasadena Museum of California Art encompasses over 60 paintings that Eduardo Carrillo (1937-1997) produced over a 40-year period. While traversing this engrossing retrospective, one feels as though perusing an eclectic panoply of peepholes...
As Karen Finley wisely counseled me some years ago, an excess of gratitude can strike you dumb (or simply annoyed speechless), which is never a good place to be, especially if you’re on a podium and expected to render judgment, offer smart advice or commentary, or...
Nathan Redwood and Folkert de Jong's tandem solo exhibits at DENK, which feature Redwood's paintings on walls surrounding de Jong's floor sculptures, integrate the two artists' discrete yet analogous flairs for applying satirical humor to classical figuration. Each...
I was going to make fun of The Pit’s group show “Vision Valley” at the Brand Library for being a "biennial," since everything is a biennial these days, until I actually read the press release (whoops) and realized that they were making fun of this exact thing...
A diverse trio of shows by significant artists is soon to close at Hauser & Wirth. If you haven't attended, and only have time to visit one gallery this week, you might try this three-for-one-special where discrete exhibitions by Mark Bradford, Geta Brătescu and...
In today’s media saturated world, exhibitions of beautifully printed, small-scale, black and white photographs tend to fall through the cracks. As Mark Ruwedel proves in “Rivers Run Through It,” quiet and subtle pictures of nature can be more seductive and meaningful...
I have to preface this sketch with an admission that seems odd even to me – as someone fairly impervious to the lure of Hollywood legend. What drew me to the first show I ever saw of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s fine art was that he was a Hollywood legend. But that term...
Tasty art offered a feast for viewers’ eyes everywhere in LA this weekend. At the Korean Cultural Center, art collective Durden and Ray offered a terrific 23-artist group show, "Odd Convergences: Steps/Missteps." The expansive upstairs gallery featured a wide range of...
Christopher Page's paintings appear as windows into neon voids. "Opening" at Baert Gallery comprises five trompe l'oeil abstractions whose geometric compositions appear flat from afar but disclose illusionistic shading as one approaches. Flashy color fields are...
Dear Reader, Who am I? Isn’t this the biggest existential question? All artists ask this question and continue to explore it. But do we ever get an answer? I watched an excellent documentary on the recently departed comedic genius, Garry Shandling, directed and...
It’s an uncharacteristically cool, rainy afternoon when I climb the steps to Judie Bamber’s home and studio in a neighborhood off Sunset. As I enter her studio—a surprisingly spare and self-contained space—a rectangle of golden light seems to float on an easel set up...
Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. — Claude Cahun Thinh Nguyen is a non-binary artist who calls our attention to the constructed nature of our ideas about race and gender. Nguyen...
When Carmen Argote was 17, her father took off for Guadalajara, Mexico, back to his hometown and his dream of living in a house he had designed for himself and his family. However, his wife felt quite settled in Los Angeles—their two children had grown up here, her...
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